I want to speak for a moment about the ideal coffee cake. I don’t claim to know how to bake the ideal, but it should taste like a block of honey, solidified and transformed into bread. That isn’t to say you necessarily use honey in the recipe, and yet the final product should taste like you did. You want it to be puffed up in the oven like a honey soufflé.
Most of the coffee cakes I’ve had in my life have been mediocre. It’s easy to overemphasize the cinnamon crumb topping and be indifferent to the bread itself. Coffee cake is not a food that’s often heralded or celebrated, and I don’t know who invented it or where. It has no entry in The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. Its ancestors might be German or Dutch, but the noticeable absence of flavor in a typical coffee cake makes it a distinctively American breakfast food, like bran muffins or cinnamon raisin bagels. For some reason I associate it with hotel breakfasts, or maybe it’s from back in the time when budget hotels offered something for breakfast besides do-it-yourself waffles. But the Joy of Cooking recipe gives you an idea of what a good coffee cake can be. It uses one cup sour cream and two eggs, mixed with one and a half cups flour, a cup sugar, two teaspoons baking powder, and a half teaspoon baking soda. For the streusel, I just made a basic crumble with sugar, cinnamon, butter, and flour; it would be good to try something more creative using walnuts or blueberry jam.
(Photo: A coffee shop in La Crosse, Wisconsin.)
365 Days of Food 